Nikhil Dev

One of the main reasons that I did not install Firefox 2 on my freshly reformatted Windows Xp laptop is because I have used it for more than an year at my work on a workstation that has about 4 gigs of RAM. My experience shows that the average browser used memory of Firefox 2 is about 650 mb. Now that is a Huuuuuuuuuge number for a single application to be using up. My laptop has just about 1 gig of Ram and I would not want half of it to be eaten by the browser itself.

I then heard about these great reviews about Firefox 3 and its memory management. I gave it a try and it exceeds my expectations by a huuuuuge margin. It tends to load pates as fast as Opera does and way too faster to IE 7.

Some of the main features that I like in Firefox 3 are its ability to remember the page titles, its new crash recovery, Download manager(my favourite) and the design. On the whole I give it a 8 out of 10.

In fact Cnet recently rated it as the best browser in the industry as of now. I tried giving IE 8 a try after I got to know about it but ended up getting dependency problems of other software. If installing a BROWSER is such a pain in the ass, then I can do without the internet.

The present version of Firefox 3 is Beta 4. You can download it here.

At first I was concerned with the extension compatibility of Firefox 3, but I you have read my post on making old extensions compatible, you will be able to get most of them working just fine on Firefox 3.

Its a MUST download.

I have been using the new Firefox 3 for more than a month now on my laptop and I seem to have no problem at all. In fact I like the new notification system and it works quite faster than Firefox 2. The only thing that I did not like was that a lot of extension that were made for FF 2 are not compatible with FF3. Even though there is not much difference in the way they are made.

But my friend Vivek has posted a solution on his blog with screenshots on how to cheat this thing in Firefox 3. It involves tweaking the extensions.checkCompatibility paramenter in the about:config section of the new Firefox and turning it off. Its very simple and now I can use my mouse gestures again. Wohoo.